Substation maintenance optimization by considering ageing equipment

Abstract

Distribution utilities are facing multitude of challenges like cost optimization, profit maximization, increasing customer satisfaction, government subsidies and changing technology. These myriad of goals are making the utilities to treat the operating and maintaining substations and their assets as a business process and it goal is to maximize the Return On Investment (ROI) on each asset. This is achieved by maintaining each asset at its optimal condition with minimum maintenance cost so as to yield more revenue per asset. Maintenance is a core process and a tweaking parameter in the asset management. Well optimized maintenance management along with the structured life cycle asset management will guarantee the overall performance. Maintenance optimization is carried out using the equipment models considering the effect of maintenance and deterioration due to aging. Objective function for Optimization is minimizing the maintenance cost and cost due to interruptions.